Late-Medieval Commonplace Culture, the Pastoral Compendium, and the Form of Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the disjointed textual form of Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living, one of the most widely circulated English texts of the Middle Ages. It argues that The Form reflects the traditions of the pastoral miscellany and compendium, which were new kinds of texts that emerged following pastoral reforms in late-medieval Europe. Expanding book ownership among parish priests led to the development of a clerical ‘commonplace culture’ in which priests excerpted useful passages from larger reference works to fill blank spaces in their books, or transformed them into streamlined compendia for devotional reading. This article argues that an important facet of Rolle’s process of composing The Form of Living involved his excerpting and reshaping larger pastoral reference works and whatever else he had to hand. This challenges the way that past scholarship has often understood the work in terms of Rolle’s individuality and personal touch: instead, this article seeks to locate Rolle’s creativity in his unlikely transformation of rote pastoral fare into ambitious devotional literature. Contextualizing The Form in this way offers a richer understanding of its form, giving insights into why Rolle chose this format and why it was valued by medieval readers. It also suggests that developing new models for late-medieval compilatio can offer new ways to think about textual organization and authorial composition more broadly.